Auschwitz: A History

Product Information

Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Transylvania when she was deported to Auschwitz; she was able to secure work in an infirmary, a job that ultimately saved her life. This 1946 memoir is an unflinching account of her time in that area, her interactions with Dr. Josef Mengeleand her observations of the medical experiments performed on inmates. A deeply uncomfortable read, Lengyel’s memoir is a necessary living, breathing document. King of the Jews byLeslie Epstein

Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT The Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT

The Allies created the International Tracing Service (ITS), now referred to as the Arolsen Archives, to centralize postwar efforts to locate missing persons and help survivors discover the fate of family members in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Along with her husband and mother-in-law (neither of whom survived), Giuliana Tedeschi was deported to Auschwitz from Italy in April 1944. This memoir, originally published in Italian in 1946, was later expanded and published in English in 1992. Translated by Tim Parks. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.I think another reason why it looms so large is because so much of it remains still and can be seen. It’s close to good transport links; it’s on the tourist trail from Kraków. In some of the interview testimonies gathered by the different foundations that are collecting them, you get a similar sort of reflection, where some people say that the self that lived on afterwards is not their ‘real’ self. They have a sense that their ‘authentic self’ died with the family and the friends who perished in the Holocaust, and the person living later is someone completely different, though they may appear to be alive and have a new family and a new life and so on. I think Charlotte Delbo was particularly successful in the way that she negotiated that. Well, I was supposed to find five books on Auschwitz. I’m wilfully choosing one which isn’t about Auschwitz, but rather about evading it. What changes then is this terrible period, the 1950s. From the late 1940s onwards, the Cold War takes precedence for the Western Allies. They start seeing former Nazis as useful in the fight against Communism, and West Germany as useful in the fight against Communism. So from then on, Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, and his government prioritized the rehabilitation of former Nazis and granted amnesties, early releases and cut sentences. The Allies—the Americans particularly—and West Germany were wholly of one mind on this.

Fifteen essential books about the Holocaust - Pan Macmillan

Wanda wrote: "While a superbly written book, The Cellist of Sarajevo may not be appropriate for this list unless one is speaking about the Bosnian Holocaust of 1992-1995."That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote very soon after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way in which she tries to develop a notion of two selves: the disassociation of her post-war self from the Auschwitz-self, a complete disconnect (or attempted disconnect) between the self who experienced and lived through Auschwitz, and the self who survived and was recounting it. That captures what a lot of survivors try to convey in one form or another: this complete caesura in their lives between what they went through and how they live later. Different people deal with it in different ways, and come to terms with it in different ways. One of the reasons why it’s become so incredibly significant in the public imagination is that it was the largest single camp that combined both an extermination camp and a labour camp. It had the largest single number of murders in the Holocaust—more than a million people were murdered there—but also an enormous number of survivors, because of this huge complex of labour camps and subcamps that it ran. So it combined the two functions.

Best Holocaust Survivor Novels (45 books) - Goodreads Best Holocaust Survivor Novels (45 books) - Goodreads

Told with a fairytale-like lyricism, this is a fable of family and redemption set against the horrors of the Holocaust. A poor woodcutter and his wife lived in a forest. Despite their poverty and the war raging around them, the wife prays that they will be blessed with a child. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. A massive extermination system, Auschwitz-Birkenau, or “Auschwitz II,” was installed by the SS as part of the systematic, continent-wide genocide of European Jews which began in late 1941-early 1942. With its apparatus of gas chambers (made to look like showering facilities) and four crematoria, Auschwitz II could literally murder 15,000 people per day. Even when it was decriminalized, Seel said he felt so ashamed about it. He couldn’t talk to his family, his friends. He tried to get married, and had children with his wife even though he was gay. He eventually became an alcoholic, had a total breakdown, got divorced and then finally came out and said he had to speak about it. Ghastly and heart-rending though Delbo’s experiences are—and I have to admit the first time I read the book I was just in tears; I couldn’t bear it—I think we have to recognize that there were other experiences too, experiences that were awful in a wide variety of ways.Top image is of the entrance to Auschwitz, 1945, courtesy of Bundesarchiv B 285 Bild-04413, KZ Auschwitz, Einfahrt.